Product Review: EMC’s Centera Storage System

EMC has unveiled its new Centera line of products designed to provide corporations with quick access to large volumes of “fixed content” data, such as documents, e-mail, spreadsheets, video, still images, CAD/CAM designs and the like.

When a user creates a document, the application server sends it to the Centera storage system. The storage system then returns a unique content address to the server. From that point, the application can request the document by submitting the address. Centera then retrieves the document regardless of where it may be physically located.

The unique address also allows the system to verify the integrity of the documents whenever a user move or copies them. And duplicates of documents get saved only once under the same address, leading to reduced storage requirements.

The Centera architecture functions as a cluster that automatically configures itself upon installation. The system also handles fail-over, load balancing and failure notification.

A Centera system with approximately 10 terabytes of storage starts at a list price of about $205,000 with installation. For more information, visit www.emc.com.